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climate change denialism

An exasperated Pat Robertson challenged President Obama and 99 percent of climate scientists over their belief in climate change today since, after all, the televangelist explained, it is snowing in Boston.

Robertson claimed that the Boston snowstorm helps prove that climate change is a myth created by scientists who have been manipulating data, even though climate change has actually been linked to growing storm intensity.

“The president goes in an interview with Vox, whatever that is, and said our real challenge is not ISIS, it’s not terrorists, it is global warming,” Robertson said. “Go to Boston, Mr. President.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who believes that human influence on climate change must be a myth because the Bible says so, said in an interview with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins last night on “Washington Watch” that climate change denialists like himself have won the debate. Not because climate scientists — over 97 percent of whom believe that human activities influence the climate — have found new data rebutting the science, but because polls show climate change dropping off the list of voters’ priorities.

“Clearly we’ve won. Gallup polls show that it’s now issue number 14 out of 15, it’s no longer issue, we’ve really won on that issue,” Inhofe boasted after voting against an unsuccessful amendment stating the fact that human activities affect climate change.

“The greatest hoax clearly is the idea that man is causing climate change,” he said. “That’s a very arrogant thing to think that man has the ability to do that.”

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and former general Robert Dees appeared on a foreign policy panel at the Values Voter Summit this morning, where they and their fellow panelists spent a good amount of time discussing the 2012 Benghazi attack and President Obama’s supposed un-American attitude.

Dees said that Common Core is also a threat to America’s security, saying that the school standards initiative, just like the White House account of Benghazi, is a left-wing effort to promote “historical revisionism” that undermines the country’s “spiritual infrastructure.”

“The historical revisionism that we see in Benghazi is symptomatic of historical revisionism we see across our country, across the world of politics and even in the Common Core curriculum of the Obama administration,” he said, claiming White House officials “change the truth to fit our liberal agenda objectives.”

Meadows, for his part, mocked government officials who are concerned about climate change’s implications for national security: “How ridiculous is that when you have our fighting men and women, they get up and they say, ‘man it’s a little chilly, maybe today is the day that we’ve got to worry about climate change.’ It’s just ridiculous.”

The science is settled – climate change is here and is already happening. For the past three decades climate scientists have warned that we must dramatically reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to avoid catastrophic climate destabilization. And yet the United States has yet to pass the legislative framework needed to shift away from a carbon-based economy.

With the threat of climate change staring us in the face, it’s not hard to understand why there has been so little progress on this issue: enormous political spending by the fossil fuels industry, which has prevented the passage of CO2 regulation. As our friends at Common Cause recently pointed out, since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, political debate around climate change has changed significantly. Prior to the Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to corporate spending in elections, there was legislation with bipartisan support to put a market-wide cap on carbon dioxide pollution. The House of Representatives even passed a “cap and trade” bill in 2009. In 2000, even George W. Bush campaigned on climate change, although he reneged on his promise as soon as he got elected. Fast forward to 2014 – climate change is rarely mentioned by many members of Congress – and sometimes denied outright.

"The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting," says U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), quoted in a recent article by Public Citizen president Robert Weissman. "Not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality ‒- nothing supports climate denial. Nothing except money. But in Congress, in this temple, money rules; so here I stand, in one of the last places on Earth that is still a haven to climate denial."

Fortunately there’s a solution. The Democracy for All Amendment would give Congress and state legislatures the ability to set reasonable limits on the amount of money that can be spent in political elections. To date, over three million Americans have signed a petition calling for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics, and dozens of organizations have begun collaborating around the need for campaign finance reform.

To deal with global challenges like climate change – the United States must be able to pass laws and lead with the best interests of the people in mind – not the best interests of multinational corporations. As many environmental groups now realize, the best way to combat climate change may be to pass campaign finance reform.

On today’s edition of the “700 Club,” Robertson said actions to curb human-influenced climate change are part of an anti-American “socialist agenda,” saying it all goes back to “the playbook of Obama’s mentor.”

Fighting climate change “is high on the agenda of the radicals who want to destroy America, it isn’t high on the agenda of those who really care about what goes on in life,” he said.

The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios is pointing to the tornado that hit the AFA’s home of Tupelo, Mississippi, yesterday as evidence that humans shouldn’t try to combat climate change.

Rios said on her radio show yesterday that tornadoes reflect the power of God, and therefore there is no point in trying to combat climate change because we are mere mortals.

“We are ants in the face of this, and so then for us to talk about controlling the weather and global — somehow if we drive different SUVs or don’t emit too much CO2 — somehow we can stop these phenomena that are so beyond our comprehension and ability we can’t do anything except film them,” she said. “What can you do, wave your fist at a tornado and say, ‘You’re not going to get me, we’re Tupelo Strong!’?”

In the new film from Truth In Action, formerly known as Coral Ridge Ministries, Southern Baptist Convention official Richard Land describes environmentalists as “watermelons” who are “green on the outside and pink on the inside.”

“Environmentalism has become a religion,” Land says. “These are recycled communists, recycled socialists, recycled collectivists who are trying to use a flawed theory of environmentalism to bring about the collectivist society they were unable to bring about politically through socialism and through communism.”

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, also interviewed for the film, accuses environmentalists of “worshiping the environment” instead of God.

Truth In Action Ministries host John Rabe, meanwhile, warns that policies targeting climate change could lead to the return of communist dictatorships that left “over 100 million people killed.”

He also accuses scientists who are working on climate issues of having a “pretention to omniscience” and committing idolatry: “One of the ways we can commit idolatry is by substituting ourselves as the creature for God, that’s what many of these scientists and bureaucrats are trying to do.”

Wisconsin GOP state senator Glenn Grothman promised in an interview with Voice of Christian Youth America last week that he will be “an outspoken opponent” of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) if he wins his race for Congress.

Grothman warned that ENDA “gives preferences” and an unfair advantage to LGBT employees: “It’s not only you can’t discriminate, it’s a preference because all of the sudden employers have to worry, ‘if I don’t hire this guy, if I don’t promote this guy, I’m going to be sued for discrimination.’”

Grothman also suggested that affirmative action is depressing job growth because “you always got to worry about being sued for who you hire, who you didn’t fire, who you promoted, who you let go.”

He added that environmental regulations are hurting the economy and mocked efforts “to reign in global warming, which doesn’t exist anyway.”

“This environmental stuff, this is the idea that is driven by this global warming thing. Global warming is not man-made and there is barely any global warming at all, there’s been no global warming for the last twelve or thirteen years. I see a shortage of Republicans stepping up to the plate and saying, ‘look, this global warming stuff is not going on,’” he said.

Today on the 700 Club, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed that the recent cold snap in North America and a ship stuck in Antarctica prove that climate change is nothing but a myth. Of course, both of his assertions are extremelydubious. While the New York Times notes that “97 to 98 percent of working climate scientists accept the evidence for human-induced climate change,” Robertson claimed that the scientists are merely lying to make money…something Robertson would never do.

“It’s getting warmer in Jupiter—and they don’t have any SUVs driving around in Jupiter—it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases it has to do with the action of the sun, there’s either two much sun or not enough sun,” Robertson said. “Think about how much money is involved. It’s money, they’re going to get a river of money.”

“Then you have politicians who want to take control and the progressives always want control, just like with health care, they want control; the EPA in America wants control of all of our energy.”

On the 700 Club today, Pat Robertson followed a segment mocking “climatism” with an interview with Steve Goreham of the climate change denying Heartland Institute. Goreham is not a climate scientist (his degree is in electrical engineering) and the Heartland Institute regularly pushesmisinformation about climate change.

Robertson, a climate change denier who has without a hint of irony criticized climate scientists as “nutty” and “fanatics,” unsurprisingly ate up Goreham’s claims that humans play no role in climate change and that higher CO2 levels help the environment.

“Warmer periods have actually been better for civilizations,” Goreham argued. “We have less extreme weather, we have longer growing seasons and we have more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now, which is actually greening the planet.” “That’s good!” Robertson replied.

Goreham lamented that SUV owners and power company officials may be treated like witches who were burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages: “There were many people in the Middle Ages that were blamed for causing the cold temperatures and the poor crops and they labeled them witches, they burned them. And so today we blame it on our neighbor’s SUV or a power plant, it’s a little bit of a medieval thing.”

“Let’s hope we don’t burn the officials of VEPCO,” Robertson joked, referring to the Virginia Electric and Power Company.

Later, Goreham said that people in New York, San Francisco and Bangladesh should be “rejoicing” about warming as “all the climate models are wrong.”

In a column today, Washington Times writer Jeffrey Kuhner claims that Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech about the United States’ failure to confront the reality of climate change really represents a plot to destroy capitalism and America itself.

Kuhner maintains that “the secular left needed a new cause” following the collapse of communism and “found it in green socialism,” which he says is now central to their goals of “crushing capitalism.”

He goes on to “expose” scientists’ grand scheme to destroy America:

Secretary of State John F. Kerry has identified America’s primary enemy. It’s not Russia, Iran, China or North Korea. Nope. It’s something even greater and more sinister: climate change. That’s right. One of the most powerful people in the world and fourth in line for succession to the presidency, Mr. Kerry is obsessed with junk science and global temperature changes. This would be comical if it were not so tragic.

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His answer is radical environmentalist legislation — high carbon taxes, imposing a cap-and-trade system upon manufacturers to coerce them into lowering carbon emissions and greater transnational cooperation in combating so-called climate change. In short, Mr. Kerry peddled a dark prophecy of an eco-apocalypse unless collective action is taken.

…

He’s wrong — dangerously wrong. Global warming is the greatest hoax of our time. In fact, the scientific evidence points the other way: Rather than heating up, the planet’s temperatures have either been steady or slightly cooling off over the past decade. The progressive left, however, continues to insist that climate change is real and irrefutable. The green movement has become a pseudo-religion, marked by blind faith, emotionalism and intolerance against dissenters.

In the end, global warming is not — and never has been —about science or even the environment. It’s about politics. Specifically, it boils down to one seminal goal: crushing capitalism through massive taxation and bureaucratic centralism in the name of environmentalism. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, the secular left needed a new cause. They found it in green socialism. Progressives no longer argued that free-market economies exploited the working class; rather, they now supposedly exploit and ravage the planet. Either way, the private sector is to be dominated by a liberal ruling elite. The new green is the old red.

Mr. Kerry’s speech shows how disconnected from reality the administration is. Imagine what our mortal enemies must be thinking. The Kremlin’s thugs, Beijing’s communists and Tehran’s mullahs — they have all (rightly) concluded that America is destroying itself. Without firing a shot, they are watching Uncle Sam slowly commit suicide. Green socialism will crush the productive sectors of our economy, draining America of the growth, dynamism and prosperity necessary to remain a world power. Embracing a climate change agenda will turn us into Europe, which is the path to national decline.

In short, Mr. Kerry is a postmodern liberal. He is a left-wing globalist, who champions anti-capitalism and multicultural social democracy. He has not fundamentally changed since his early days in politics. His philosophy is rooted in the radical chic of the 1960s: the hatred of America.

It is deeply disturbing that the man at the head of U.S. diplomacy was a traitor to his country and fellow soldiers. In 1971, he slandered our troops by lying—under oath in front of a Senate committee—that he saw U.S. troops commit countless atrocities not seen since “Genghis Khan.” He then later threw away another soldier’s medals on Capitol Hill to protest the Vietnam War. His actions not only libeled our noble efforts in Southeast Asia, they gave aid and comfort to the communist Viet Cong. This alone should have disqualified him from being secretary of state.

Televangelist Pat Robertson has, like so many on the Right, turned very quickly from advocating awareness of climate change to denying that it exists at all. On today’s 700 Club, Robertson laughs off a recent Princeton University study that found that climate change is increasing the rate of blizzards while leading to a drop in total snowfall.

Without a hint of self-awareness, Robertson claims that climate scientists are simply elitist ideologues who will hold onto their beliefs in global warming no matter what.

“Only in Princeton would people say nutty things like that,” Robertson said. “You know, they get to be PhDs and they wonder where they’ve studied and learned all these things. But I tell you, if you’re a true believer bad things will happen because you see them coming.”

Among the “nutty” professors Robertson attacks is Princeton geosciences expert Michael Oppenheimer, interviewed earlier in the program, who served in the Nobel Prize-winning International Panel on Climate Change.

A group of Arizona Republicans are out with a new bill to undermine the teaching of evolution and subjects such as climate change and cloning in the classroom. The National Center for Science Education called the legislation another “instance of the ‘academic freedom’ strategy for undermining the teaching of evolution and climate change.”

The proposed “teach the controversy” bill is a stealthy attack on evolution as it tries to make science classes give equal weight to nonscientific beliefs and theologies. It’s the equivalent of including claims made by the Flat Earth Society in a geology class, all for the sake of “balance.”

A. THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, COUNTY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS, SCHOOL DISTRICT GOVERNING BOARDS, SCHOOL DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENTS, SCHOOL PRINCIPALS AND SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS SHALL ENDEAVOR TO:

1. CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT IN SCHOOLS THAT ENCOURAGES PUPILS TO EXPLORE SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS, LEARN ABOUT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS AND RESPOND APPROPRIATELY AND RESPECTFULLY TO DIFFERENCES OF OPINION ABOUT CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES.

2. ASSIST TEACHERS TO FIND EFFECTIVE WAYS TO PRESENT THE SCIENCE CURRICULUM AS IT ADDRESSES SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSIES. TEACHERS SHALL BE ALLOWED TO HELP PUPILS UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, CRITIQUE AND REVIEW IN AN OBJECTIVE MANNER THE SCIENTIFIC STRENGTHS AND SCIENTIFIC WEAKNESSES OF EXISTING SCIENTIFIC THEORIES COVERED IN THE COURSE BEING TAUGHT.

B. THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, COUNTY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS, SCHOOL DISTRICT GOVERNING BOARDS, SCHOOL DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENTS, SCHOOL PRINCIPALS AND SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS SHALL NOT PROHIBIT ANY TEACHER IN THIS STATE FROM HELPING PUPILS UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, CRITIQUE AND REVIEW IN AN OBJECTIVE MANNER THE SCIENTIFIC STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF EXISTING SCIENTIFIC THEORIES COVERED IN THE COURSE BEING TAUGHT.

C. THIS SECTION PROTECTS ONLY THE TEACHING OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION AND DOES NOT PROMOTE ANY RELIGIOUS OR NONRELIGIOUS DOCTRINE, PROMOTE DISCRIMINATION FOR OR AGAINST A PARTICULAR SET OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR NONBELIEFS OR PROMOTE DISCRIMINATION FOR OR AGAINST RELIGION OR NONRELIGION.

Sec. 2. Intent

The legislature finds and declares that:

1. An important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to becoming intelligent, productive and scientifically informed citizens.

2. The teaching of some scientific subjects, including biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning, can cause controversy.

3. Some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects.

Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center, the group which blends typical right-wing warnings about looming one world government with conspiracies about efforts to protect the environment, on Monday’s edition of Crosstalkclaimed that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a threat to humanity or the earth at large because “trees give off carbon dioxide; all the plants around us give it off.” In fact, DeWeese said the earth may not have enough CO2, and called people who believe in human-influenced climate change “idiots.”

DeWeese: The bottom line is, CO2 is not a poison to human beings, CO2 is not affecting the atmosphere, there is absolutely no evidence, I can say this with absolute confidence, there is no evidence of man-made global warming causing problems. We are actually going through a cooling period right now, which is going to increase over the next few years, it’s cyclical, it happens. I used to have a weatherman in my hometown who started the weather by saying ‘whether it’s cold or whether it’s hot, we’ll always have weather, whether or not’ and that’s exactly what this is. Every time we have a dry season or we have strong hurricanes or we have a really hot summer or a mild winter, these idiots start this drumbeat again, ‘global warming, see here’s what it is.’ They tried to say that this year is the warmest on record, it’s not. They will just keep coming up with his stuff, it’s just craziness.

…

Trees give off carbon dioxide; all the plants around us give it off. The fact is some scientists have done some studies saying we’ve got a carbon dioxide shortage right now. That then causes plants to die, that causes environmental damage.

While one Religious Right writer last week claimed that the environmental movement came from Nazi Germany, DeWeese told host Jim Schneider of VCY America that environmentalism actually came from communist leaders who were looking for a new way to destroy freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc:

Schneider: Aren’t we really talking about a worldwide, socialistic plan with this?

DeWeese: Absolutely, there is nothing else, that’s what it’s about. We wouldn’t give up our liberties in America when we were facing the Cold War and the Soviet Union and they tried to make the argument that Marx was superior, we wouldn’t give up our liberties then. When Communism fell back in the beginning of the 1990s, all these leaders of these countries, these communist countries and some of the organizations connected to them went into the environmental movement and they got us to start to sacrifice our liberties with the threat of environmental Armageddon. These Chicken Little scares that ‘the world is coming to an end, it’s selfish for you to want to have your job, build your home and have your family when the earth is going to come to an end, there is nothing you can do, you can’t escape.’ That’s been the argument all this time. There is no science to it. There is no science that supports this environmental Armageddon, these scare tactics that they are using but they continue to do it so that’s what we’re up against here.

But like Newt Gingrich, who costarred in an ad with Nancy Pelosi for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, Robertson shared a couch with Al Sharpton for ACP’s “We Can Solve It” campaign to raise awareness about climate change in 2008:

While people across the world celebrate their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability, a powerful coalition of corporate and religious right organizations are seeking to radically redefine our relationship with the environment.

While people across the world celebrate their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability, a powerful coalition of corporate and religious right organizations are seeking to radically redefine our relationship with the environment.